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Comment by throwie | Hacker News Reader

I still use IE as my default browser (and Firefox as a fallback), for the following reasons:

– The font rendering works better for my eyesight.

– Killer feature: Ctrl+N/K clones the browser window/tab including the history. I.e. you can effectively fork the history. EDIT: And, equally important, opening a link in a new tab/window also preserves (clones) the history.

– Certain keyboard operations have better usability than on other browsers.

– The title bar + address/tab bar height height is smallest among all browsers (after some configuration).

I’m slowly getting used to the inevitability of migrating to Firefox. The font rendering and especially the clone-by-keyboard feature are the hardest part though. (And the fact that Firefox doesn’t allow yellow as a search highlight color.)

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Fwiw Firefox's "duplicate tab" feature similarly clones history. It only exists for tabs though, not entire windows. Right-click the tab, it's in the context menu.

To be fair, on IE it doesn't clone the entire window, just the current tab into a new window. Still, that's my main use case, and AFAICT it's not possible in Firefox by keyboard or even with a single mouse action.

There's multiple extensions that claim to provide a shortcut to the duplicate tab option, fwiw

Thanks. Now that I looked into it again, the issue I have is not just the Duplicate Tab feature, but that opening a link in a new tab or window clears the history of that new tab/window instead of cloning the history of the source tab. that means that you can't quickly open a couple of links into new tabs/windows, with each of them preserving the current history. I don't think there's a fix for that.

Ah yes, I remember loving that feature in Netscape at the tail end, when it was just an altered clone of Firefox.

I got used to losing it eventually after switching over, but I do remember it being a painful transition for me too.

There's a mouse shortcut for Duplicate Tab in Firefox: middle-click the Reload button! It blew my mind when I read about it in some random thread a couple of years ago.

I've been using it since more or less the start and didn't know that. Thanks!

Same for Chrome. This is amazing.

Some UI features on Firefox can be customized using userChrome.css [1]. I bet you can make title bar as small as you like and change search highlight color. For font rendering you could create a bug report.

[1] https://www.userchrome.org/

Regarding the search highlight color, Firefox has the (mis)feature that if the highlight background color is too close to the text background color (which is the case for yellow vs. white background), then it inverts the search highlight text and background color, i.e. you get yellow text on black background for the highlight, instead of black text on yellow background. The rationale is accessiblity, i.e. requiring a minimum contrast for the highlight background against the normal background. But for me that behavior is anti-accessibility, and it can't be turned off. The issue has been raised since the behavior was introduced in 2009, but the maintainers don't want to change it. The corlor inversion implementation also seems to be pretty deep in the stack, and tied to the HTML <mark> tag.

Regarding font rendering, there have been multiple issue reports over the years, although most users complain that Firefox doesn't render text like Chrome, which I tend to find even worse than Firefox. ;)

If you middle-click the refresh button in chrome it clones the current tab with history. You can also middle click the back button to clone the previous page in a new tab with history preserved.

Thanks. The main problem is that there doesn't seem to be a way to access it by keyboard. Secondly, it's also not possible to convert a tab to a separate window by keyboard. So what is a single keypress on IE becomes a cumbersome operation.

Thank you, I didn't know that!! I always wondered why there is no shortcut to duplicate the current tab.

Have you looked into https://www.mactype.net/ to see if it would help with any of your font rendering issues?

Is there a page somewhere that explains what it does? I’m not a particular fan of macOS font rendering though.

Then actually it might not help you too much... it's really a replacement font rendering engine for Windows (initially Windows GDI rendering and now they're adding in support for DirectWrite). It uses FreeType with various parameters to make the font rendering look more like macOS (in a nutshell: macOS doesn't use aggressive hinting to force the font shapes into the pixel grid, which makes it blurrier but more accurate on low-resolution screens; Windows does, and so it looks sharper on low-resolution screens).

However while looking around at a bug report to get MacType to work in Firefox [0] I came across a setting in Firefox's about:config [1] that can change the font rendering and that might help you out. Not sure about the history forking thing but there may be some Firefox extension to help with that.

[0] https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/issues/673 [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=652141

Thanks. Yes, I tried all possible parameters for font rendering in Firefox. For some reason none of them match the sharpness of the IE rendering.

Have you considered using a 4K screen with 200% scaling? That would considerably sharpen text in any situation compared to a 1080p screen.

Yes, but (a) there’s too much software I still use that isn’t hi-DPI capable, and (b) I use a 1920x1200 display so would lose 10% vertical height, which is quite significant.

It’s all a question of trade-offs of course

If you mouse3 on the refresh button in Firefox you get a tab clone with history.

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